The present invention relates generally to the area of information processing and, more particularly, to apparatus and methods for reconciling ordinal information, especially time-based information.
Successful management of one's time is a goal that every successful professional must achieve. One's business day may be swept away in a deluge of meetings and appointments, all of which must be somehow managed. An attempt to manage this task on paper, such as with a simple wall calendar, is unworkable for all but the simplest of schedules. More likely, such unsophisticated aids to managing one's time will lead to scheduling conflicts, missed appointments, botched deadlines, and angry clients.
The first allies that professionals discovered were portable organizers, such as the Daytime™ or the Lafax™. However, an increasing number are discovering the power of personal computers for managing appointments. Several scheduling packages are available for the PC. While not as portable as paper organizers, scheduling packages offer increased flexibility in other areas. For example, one may view his or her schedule from a variety of views—by month, week, day, or priority—and attach detailed notes to appointments. Additional options available include the ability to automatically schedule a meeting for the first Monday of every other month, or display horizontal bars which graphically represent one's weekly schedule, so that free time can be quickly pinpointed. Other options include the ability to easily edit an entry, and set alarms as a reminder of important appointments.
With ever increasing emphasis on miniaturization and portability, several of the features of scheduling packages may now be found in handheld information processing devices, such as the Sharp Wizard™ or the Casio BOSS™. Being roughly the size of a handheld calculator, these electronic organizers are often carried when one is away from the office. As a tradeoff for portability, however, these devices typically forego several of the more desirable features found on desktop personal computers (e.g., full color graphics display). As a result, it is common for a professional to employ a personal computer to manage his or her time, yet carry a portable organizer when he or she is away from the office. Upon returning to the office, the information in the personal computer is then updated with the new information in the portable organizer.
Updating or reconciling two sets of information, whether between a PC and an organizer, or between two computers joined by a communication network, has never been easy. The reconciliation of scheduling information has been particularly difficult. Not only must one take into account when an event occurs, but one must also account for the duration of the event. While prior art organizers and scheduling packages are very useful for managing one's own schedule, they have thus far been inadequate for resolving two or more schedules. As a result, a user who wishes to reconcile two different schedules must rely on awkward data entry techniques to achieve the reconciliation.
What is needed is a system which allows a user of an information processing device to readily reconcile two or more schedules, or other time-based lists. The present invention fulfills this and other needs.